G80 is not unified architecture ?

[Ubermann]

Despite of the fact that Microsoft’s next-generation graphics application programming interface (API) will be able to take advantage of unified shader processors, at least Nvidia Corp.’s first DirectX 10-capable chip will utilize dedicated pixel and vertex processors, according to some rumours.

Nvidia’s code-named G80 graphics processing unit (GPU) will incorporate 48 pixel shader processors and an unknown number of vertex shader processors, some unofficial sources said. The chip is still expected to support feature-set of DirectX 10 along with Shader Model 4.0, even though it will not take advantage of the unified processors that can compute both pixel and vertex shaders.

Read more: X-bit labs (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20060220100915.html)

[taurus_sel]

pffff, it's gonna be a POS then....just as I expected. R600 is going to walk all over G80.


Read more: X-bit labs (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20060220100915.html)

[Vapor]

pffff, it's gonna be a POS then....just as I expected. R600 is going to walk all over G80.Ehhh....?

Please don't make unfounded statements.

[Syn.]

Ehhh....?

Please don't make unfounded statements.

many people are making loads of unfounded comments. Most people are saying "G71 will have 32pp it will own X19XTX", dont you think thats also unfounded?

Anyway anyone can deduct that if NV makes a chip thats not fully DX10 complaint then ofcourse R6xx will win. ATi has R500 which has unified shaders all they have to do is combine R500+R580 and then nothing can stop them as the next G71 seems to be not able to beat XTX, thats also unfounded but thats all we are hearing at the moment and it seems more logical then beliving that a hybrid will win over an original.

[biohead]

many people are making loads of unfounded comments. Most people are saying "G71 will have 32pp it will own X19XTX", dont you think thats also unfounded?

Anyway anyone can deduct that if NV makes a chip thats not fully DX10 complaint then ofcourse R6xx will win. ATi has R500 which has unified shaders all they have to do is combine R500+R580 and then nothing can stop them as the next G71 seems to be not able to beat XTX, thats also unfounded but thats all we are hearing at the moment and it seems more logical then beliving that a hybrid will win over an original.
qft

[gundamit]

Ehhh....?

Please don't make unfounded statements.

30 posts from taurus_sel and they really speak for themselves. ;) Here's my favorite.

Hey if you don't like it, ignore it. Have you ever considered what you think is "crap" is actually the truth? What just because there isn't a link it's false? Just because you don't know about it it's not true? Please.

[Vapor]

I'm sorry, but we really don't know ANYTHING about the performance of the R600. Yes it's unified, but in the end that doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of raw performance.

We don't know how the G80 is going to perform either...it might be (relative to the G70) an R420 relative to an R300 (same architecture essentially, just more pipes and clocks) or an R520 relative to an R420 ('same' pipes, more clocks, more efficiency). With this news we now 'know' (it can certainly change, remember that) it will indeed have more pipes, but we know nothing of architectural differences, NOTHING of clocks, yadda yadda yadda.

We can approximate, making best and worst guides with what we know (worst: 2 times the performance of a G70-256; best: ~2.5 times the performance of the G70-512 are my guesses) for stuff that we have general info for (as was very kindly provided by Ubermann).

An R520 with 48 unified pipes is kinda baffling in terms of performance, IDK where it'll end up frankly. On top of that, we don't even know how many pipes it has....recently, upcoming ATi cards (RV530, R580, R590, etc.) are hard to pin performance on because of their architectural uniqueness (48 shaders, 16 ROPS/TMUs [or whatever], 8 vertex shaders vs 16, 16, 8 is not exactly predictable if you know what I mean ;))

But coming out and saying a chip will be worse than another simply because of an architectural difference is unfounded.

I look forward to this chip....I just hope nV didn't get too happy with their G70 like ATi did with their R300. Playing catch-up didn't help ATi and nV isn't ahead like ATi was back in the day of R300/350/360 and partially 420/480.

[gundamit]

Playing catch-up didn't help ATi and nV isn't ahead like ATi was back in the day of R300/350/360 and partially 420/480. Hopefully neither will dominate making both accelerate performance gains. I'm glad ATI seems to be back on track and both seem to be right on top of each other. :D

With parity between the companies everyone wins except those who want to continue making bombastic statements that would have you believe one company is allied with the devil while the other deserves our unquestioning worship.

[Ubermann]

I wonder about how games will perform..
And i also wonder how much more pipes can they add ? there has to be a limit even with 90nm for them, consider SM4 also eats some million transistors i guess.

(Dont forget its still just a rumour)

[Vapor]

I wonder about how games will perform..
And i also wonder how much more pipes can they add ? there has to be a limit even with 90nm for them, consider SM4 also eats some million transistors i guess.Agreed....and there will be diminishing returns since it will be increasingly difficult to increase pipe count percentagewise.

[Ubermann]

Maybe it gets beaten by ATI in DX10 games and beats R600 in preDX10 games.
So its both good and bad..

Im still waiting for that WOW!! (drop jaw) incredible card instead of this 10-20% faster stuff, i want something new high tech blow everything away hardware.
New company with new ideas would be nice..

[biohead]

Maybe it gets beaten by ATI in DX10 games and beats R600 in preDX10 games.
So its both good and bad..

Im still waiting for that WOW!! (drop jaw) incredible card instead of this 10-20% faster stuff, i want something new high tech blow everything away hardware.
New company with new ideas would be nice..
Back in the day , it was WOW! when a new generation scored twice the points in 3dm03 at stock. Now that's hardly possible because of the CPU bottleneck, but technologydevelopment is going so predictably straight forward lately, that we've seemed to adapt to fast changes. Years back it was way different. So in my opinion, a wowcard is relative. I play games at 1024x768 anyways, for me there is no need for a wowcard, the framerate will be wow anyways (going from x800xtpe tot x1900xt - yeah I know, what an investment :slap:)

[[XC] leviathan18]

cpu limited?????

come on that is only if you play at 1024x768 no AA no AF play @ 1600x1200 with AA and AF and you will see you are limited by the graphic card

[Thorry]

yeah plus CPU development doesn't stand still... |: (

[Revv23]

cpu's have been at a stand still imo.

since the release of AMD64 they have had what? 600mhz in speed bumps? over how long? like 2-3 years?

certainly these are much more able cpu's then the ones we first saw but stock performance hasnt gone up that much over the past few years and video cards are more then double as fast.

personnally, it seems to me that even competition makes for great cards, at rediculously high prices, but then when one company has an edge over another, prices drop, because one company has to drop prices to compete. personnaly, i am ready for some lower prices.

[turtle]

Maybe it gets beaten by ATI in DX10 games and beats R600 in preDX10 games.
So its both good and bad..


This is EXACTLY what I thought when comparing a what-I-thought was unfied architecture of G80 vs a GDDR4 R580 (both on 80nm). I thought G80 would have 48 unified pipes, while R580 would have 48ps and 8vs. Do the math, plus add in unified shaders having to emulate dx9 (p/v shaders) and ...ATi FTW on dx9. With a DX9 card not being able to utilize DX10, Nvidia FTW on DX10. Tables could indeed turn, although the shaders numbers relative to the parts won't be the same...It'll prolly be a little more equal.

It makes sense...although...It makes me think even more that a GDDR4 R580 should take on G80...Might stand a good chance...or at least a fighting one until R600.

As for the G80 revelation...Seems the tables have turned on my guesstimate, and murkied. If R600 is indeed unfied pipes, which it's pretty-much agreed it will be...Then It'll be 48+? (nvidia) vs 64 unified shaders (Ati).

I'm fairly certain that those old leaked specs on R600 are going to become reality:

80nm
64 Shader pipelines (Vec4+Scalar)
32 TMU's
32 ROPs
128 Shader Operations per Cycle
800MHz Core
102.4 billion shader ops/sec
512GFLOPs for the shaders
2 Billion triangles/sec
25.6 Gpixels/Gtexels/sec
256-bit 512MB 1.8GHz GDDR4 Memory
57.6 GB/sec Bandwidth (at 1.8GHz)
WGF2.0 Unified Shader

It also comes four months after Nvidia's product, which may leave them time to counter relatively quickly afterwards.

I'm also glad (and not completely surprized...Even though it is surprizing as it's not what we were led to believe) they went 48ps instead of 48us, as 48 seems like a low number for such a part (It would be like Xenos..except prolly 24x2 instead of 16x3), and June would have been too early to adopt the technology for PC's, as it won't be used for awhile, and have detrimental impact in the meantime.

At least G80 and R600 will prolly share the same shader/texture ratio.....2:1, which is refreshing we won't have to worry about that.

[nn_step]

Honestly I don't care about that.. all I care is if it is a monster...

[SnipingWaste]

If the G80 is not unified then its will be WGF 1.0 and not WGF 2.0. Unified shader is one of the specs of WGF 2.0 so whats going to happen when the WGF 2.0 only games come out? There has been a lot of talk about new game only working with Vista and only WGF 2.0 complient hardware.

[bullet2urbrain]

cpu limited?????

come on that is only if you play at 1024x768 no AA no AF play @ 1600x1200 with AA and AF and you will see you are limited by the graphic card

CPU will probably be the biggest factor... anyone here have a CPU that can push 2 x1900xtx's in XFire to their limit? nope. what about even the "outdated" 512GTX? nope still dont think so. its closer but still not quite.

we'll need to see something new... maybe AM2 maybe Conroe.. but either way the need for a more powerful CPU is becoming more and more evident from the gaming perspective

[Starscream]

lets say the G80 wont b unified.
and that it will lose in Dx10 games vs a R600.

but will that really matter if the G80 hits the stores months before the r600 does?
it will b the same story as with the 7800 vs the X1800.
yeah the X1800 beats the GTX256MB but the 7800 was in the stores 4 months orso before the X1800 slowly drippled in and nvidia sold allot of em in that time.

so if the G80 hits the stores 2 or 3 months before the R600 does nvidia will sell alot of em.
wich gives them time to prep a decent unified card wich will come shortly after the R600. Unless ofcourse they screw up as they did with the 7800GTX512

[[XC] leviathan18]

CPU will probably be the biggest factor... anyone here have a CPU that can push 2 x1900xtx's in XFire to their limit? nope. what about even the "outdated" 512GTX? nope still dont think so. its closer but still not quite.

we'll need to see something new... maybe AM2 maybe Conroe.. but either way the need for a more powerful CPU is becoming more and more evident from the gaming perspective


try to play 1920x1200 fear with soft shadows and 8AA 16AF and tell me if you are cpu limited or gpu limited

[bullet2urbrain]

try to play 1920x1200 fear with soft shadows and 8AA 16AF and tell me if you are cpu limited or gpu limited


i was agreeing with you above.. and in my case im both.. even with GTX's SLi'd im both limited.. moreso CPU tho

[Pinnacle]

many people are making loads of unfounded comments..


Thats true. Its getting annoying.

Its unfortunate it wont be unified

[[XC] leviathan18]

at that resolution the cpu wont help getting more fps if you paly at lower resolution you become more and more cpu limited... all depends @ what resolution are you playing

[Ubermann]

lets say the G80 wont b unified.
and that it will lose in Dx10 games vs a R600.

but will that really matter if the G80 hits the stores months before the r600 does?
it will b the same story as with the 7800 vs the X1800.
yeah the X1800 beats the GTX256MB but the 7800 was in the stores 4 months orso before the X1800 slowly drippled in and nvidia sold allot of em in that time.

so if the G80 hits the stores 2 or 3 months before the R600 does nvidia will sell alot of em.
wich gives them time to prep a decent unified card wich will come shortly after the R600. Unless ofcourse they screw up as they did with the 7800GTX512

All i care about is that i want one of them in my comp, i dont care much about their money.

[DilTech]

This was posted in the 7900GT/GTX thread, I'll just repost what I said there...

I must say, I'm not believing that article...

It's definitely a rumour, reason being?
1.) Why would NVidia release a card with only as many pixel shaders as the R580 6-8 months AFTER the R580's release?
2.) DX10 requires pixel shaders, Vertex shaders, AND geometry shaders!(http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/d3d10overview/)

With Direct3D 10 we have a new programmable unit – giving three in total: Vertex Shaders (VS), Geometry Shaders (GS) and Pixel Shaders (PS). All three form "Shader Model 4.0". Both vertex and pixel shaders are fundamentally the same as they always have been – but with a few added bells and whistles. However, the Geometry Shader is completely new – and allows us to write code that operates on a per-primitive basis. Not only that, but it also allows us to add geometry procedurally – effectively extending the hardware to a whole new class of algorithm.

3.) AFAIK unified shaders is required for DX10, if G80 uses fixed function pipelines then G80 will NOT be DX10 compliant...

Also, anyone else notice the quote they used from NVidia was during the "hype" wars between ati and nvidia over who's console would be best? NVidia said they won't do unified shaders then because they were trying to HELP HYPE the PS3 over the Xbox360!!!

Either way, this is either fake, or G80 isn't a DX10 part. Regardless, there's enough holes in that story to sink the titanic. Even if DX10 doesn't require unified shaders it DOES require geometry shaders, which Xbit completely left out. It's FAKE. End of story.

[Pinnacle]

what he said dido

[DilTech]

So you post the same link that this thread started with???

[Pinnacle]

oops hehe

Not thinking right, dropped a dumbbell on my head yesterday :)

[Ubermann]

End of story

You cant just end it for us like that ?!
Its a new rumour and were having fun :cool:

[Cybercat]

cpu's have been at a stand still imo.

since the release of AMD64 they have had what? 600mhz in speed bumps? over how long? like 2-3 years?

certainly these are much more able cpu's then the ones we first saw but stock performance hasnt gone up that much over the past few years and video cards are more then double as fast.

personnally, it seems to me that even competition makes for great cards, at rediculously high prices, but then when one company has an edge over another, prices drop, because one company has to drop prices to compete. personnaly, i am ready for some lower prices.
well, they did add a second core to them as well...

plus DDR2 for AMD.....Conroe for Intel..... I don't know about you but I'm pretty excited about the advancements thus far.